Not in the Marcotte home. We always wait until after Epiphany to take down the tree, pack up the nativity, and roll up the leftover paper. The wise men need to visit, after all. It gives me some down time to truly appreciate our many blessings.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on the last of the grandie quilts (more on that later) and embroidering some small Christmas ornaments for the coming year.

This embroidery business is taking over! It started with the nativity scenes that are on the tree now. Then, we discovered another stash of thread in my mother-in-law’s things. I decided to put those on reels and add them to my already huge collection.

But I saw a squirrel of snowflakes on another blog and followed the link. I am now the happy owner of 400+ embroidery motifs. Of course, it took a long minute to figure out how to print what I needed. Adobe couldn’t just do! So I created my own snowflakes to practice on. Not bad, really, but now I can do it correctly. Hopefully I’ll get better results.

I started just folding the fabric to find the center and used the creases to draw lines with a Frixion marker, which is removed with heat. The designs are stitched in an improv manner.

Finally, this afternoon I finagled a solution and printed my first snowflakes. Aren’t these going to be sweet? I was able to reduce them to fit my 2.5″ embroidery frames, which will also hold the pieces for hanging.